#charity urges techies to donate their time and expertise to help non-profit organizations

While it’s always nice to see tech companies make good on their Corporate Social Responsibility promises with donations and initiatives, a new program from Budapest will soon let individuals from the industry pitch in, by volunteering their skills to help NGOs.

Set to launch this March, #charity is a platform that connects non-profits with IT professionals to collaborate on projects like apps, sites and content that would normally cost a pretty penny to commission.

In addition to helping NGOs save money, it gives techies a chance to lend a helping hand while making the best use of their skills and experience. The team behind #charity says they’ll use an advanced matching algorithm to scan participants’ LinkedIn profiles and pair them with organizations.

To help keep projects on track, #charity also features a project management system for volunteers and NGOs to host virtual team communication, and will integrate other platforms. The initial release will include Prezi, Slack, Github, Trello and Dropbox. The team estimates that projects should take about three months each to complete.

Ahead of the launch, #charity is hosting a series of hackathons. It aims to sign up over 500 volunteers and evangelists for the program. It already has 350 participants on board.

#charity’s pilot programs involving volunteers include this Prezi presentation for Syria Deeply, a video streaming app to help Action Against Hunger monitor and showcase the impacts of its projects in the field, and impact data visualization tools for the Chicago-based non-profit Moneythink.

#charity is the brainchild of Jozsef Czapovich, Director of engineering at Prezi, who came up with the idea after learning about the huge technology gap in the NGO world at a conference.

The platform has scored a $250,000 seed investment from Vienna-based Fiedler Capital, and is currently accepting registrations from volunteers for early access.

➤ #charity